ELEMENTALS: WOMEN SCULPTING ANIMISM

NOVEMBER 1 - DECEMBER 13, 2014

Cavin-Morris is pleased to present an exhibition of living women artists working with ancient concepts and materials in a completely contemporary way.

This exhibition expands on the idea of these artworks being part of a language that expresses the animist essence of life. Animism is a belief in the souls of non-human entities. It is spiritual rather than religious, intuitive rather than empirical. There is a wide range of work in the exhibition from the intellectual intricacies of Phyllis Sullivan’s force webs to the stark almost Neolithic but intensely worked roughness of Sarah Purvey’s urns. Many of the more vessel-like pieces consciously charge the spaces they contain, animating them by concealing them in shadow or stippling them with surface light.

All pieces are in conversation with the Elementals of fire, water, earth and air. It is claimed by some archaeologists that women invented pottery and the weaving of plant materials into textiles and baskets. The mainstream is hesitant about stepping into non-empirical spaces but that is precisely what this exhibition is about; those original forms and processes that have been here forever yet continue to change and mutate into absolutely contemporary statements.

Perhaps this unseen but assumed connection is expressed best in this quote from a Ngarindjeri woman from Australia, Doreen Kartinyeri, explaining the seen and unseen references in her basketry: “…all about the same way…the way we do everything in a circle…a circle that’s tying us all together. It’s binding us together. The tightness of the stitches is like the closeness of the family…when you finish and you’re on the last strand of the rush, that is the filling, and when we do it that way, you can’t see where it ends. And that is the miwi because there is no end to the miwi…to the lifeline.” Miwi is the indigenous word for intangible intuitions, survival and morality and balance in life that is not non-material.